www.lucent.com

Lucent Technologies and Novatel Wireless today announced two new customer contracts for Merlin U530 UMTS PC Card Modems with mobile operators in Europe, further consolidating their leadership in the 3G UMTS PC card market. Following new agreements with Orange and Portugal's TMN, Lucent and Novatel Wireless are now supplying Merlin U530 UMTS PC Cards to 10 major European and international operators, supporting commercial 3G service rollouts in a dozen countries.

By plugging the PC cards into a laptop and installing the necessary client software, UMTS customers are able to connect to their operators' UMTS networks, enabling access to their corporate intranets as well as high-quality streaming video and audio, secure mobile access to e-mail with large attachments and other information stored behind corporate firewalls at data transfer speeds of up to 384 kilobits per second.

Lucent and Novatel Wireless have previously announced UMTS data card contracts with operators including 3 (Australia, Denmark, Hong Kong, Italy, Sweden and the UK), e-plus (Germany), Telecom Italia Mobile (Italy), Telefonica Moviles Espana (Spain), O2 (Germany) and T-Mobile (Austria, Germany, UK).

"Today's announcements demonstrate the support that Lucent and Novatel Wireless are providing to mobile operators worldwide as they launch their 3G UMTS service offerings," said Roger Derrien, vice president for UMTS product management with Lucent's Mobility Solutions Group. "Our research demonstrates that there is a strong demand for high-speed data services among enterprise customers and this is confirmed by the purchasing decisions of the major European operators and their roll-out of commercial 3G services to the business market using these UMTS PC card modems."

"The success of our strong partnership with Lucent has helped establish the Merlin U530 as the dominant UMTS PC card modem in Europe and internationally," said Peter Leparulo, CEO of Novatel Wireless. "We are very pleased that the major operators in Europe are using our technology to coincide with their 3G deployments. Looking forward we expect to continue to build on our leading position in Europe. In addition, we will focus on replicating our success internationally as we incorporate our technology with leading carriers deploying 3G networks in Asia and North America."